VIENNA, May 30: The UN atomic agency has vowed to persist in investigating Libya's now abandoned nuclear weapons programme, as much to discover new facts about Libya as about the international smuggling network that supplied it.
The International Atomic Energy Agency is to further probe Libya's two-decade-long quest to develop nuclear weapons as questions linger about highly enriched uranium particles found in the north African state and a global black market, according to a confidential IAEA report released to diplomats in Vienna on Friday.
The report is to be submitted to a meeting of the 35-nation IAEA board of governors that opens in Vienna on June 14 and at which IAEA chief Mohamed El Baradei had said in February that he hoped to close the Libyan dossier.
The IAEA, the UN organization that verifies adherence to non-proliferation safeguards, has been overseeing Libya's disarmament, which Tripoli agreed to last December 19 with the United States and Britain.
Turkey is now seen as a source of centrifuge parts shipped to Libya's nuclear weapons programme, diplomats said. While Libya had agreed in December to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction programme, in March a container of components for sophisticated L-2 centrifuges used to enrich uranium up to bomb-grade levels arrived by boat in Libya, the IAEA said in its report.
The container had "escaped the attention" of the US-led teams which had seized five containers of centrifuge parts from "the cargo ship BBC China in October 2003," the IAEA said.
A senior diplomat close to the IAEA told AFP the agency was investigating parts that had been manufactured in Turkey and that this might be the shipment that had arrived in March. The diplomat confirmed a report that an important quantity of nuclear equipment secretly purchased by Libya appears to be missing. -AFP
